What is a musician’s response to the condition of the world? Do musicians have an obligation and an opportunity to serve the needs of the world with their musicianship?
At a time of crisis for the classical music profession, with a changing commercial landscape, a shrinking audience base, and a contraction in the number of professional orchestras, how does a young musician construct a career today? Are we looking at a dying art form or a moment of reinvigoration?
In this course we will develop a response to these questions, and we will explore the notion that the classical musician, the artist, is an important public figure with a critical role to play in society.
The course will include inquiry into a set of ideas in philosophy of aesthetics; a discussion about freedom, civil society, and ways that art can play a role in readying people for democracy; discussion on philosophy of education as it relates to the question of positive social change; and an exploration of musical and artistic initiatives that have been particularly focused on a positive social impact.
Guiding questions for this course inquiry will include:
- How can classical music effect social change?
- How has music made positive change in communities around the globe?
- What can the field of classical music learn from other movements for social change?
- How have educators and philosophers thought about the arts and their connection to daily contemporary life?
Each class will explore one critical question through lectures, discussions, interviews, or documentaries.

Reviews

FB

Its a few years ago that I did this, but I still remember and value the course and the approach in teaching it. I have shared the information many times.

SW

May 22, 2020

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

The information I learned in this course was incredibly relevant. I hate that the course had to end. Anyone friendly to the arts should take this course.

From the lesson

Arts and Urban Renewal

How have the arts been a driving force for change in American cities? What are the potentials and pitfalls when positioning artists in this role? This class will pursue these questions through a series of case studies, including a video tour of arts organizations focused on urban renewal in Providence and New Haven, and the development of Lincoln Center in New York City.

Taught By

Sebastian Ruth

Transcript

We'll start our thinking about cities with a discussion of a very visible example of arts organizations that have transformed a place. And that's the example of Lincoln Center in New York, the Performing Arts Center that includes the marbled halls for the Metropolitan Opera, the concert hall for the New York Philharmonic, the Lincoln Center Theater recital and dance venues and more. Lincoln Center is a good place to begin this examination of arts organizations in urban places, not only because it's an iconic space in American artistic life, but also because its creation sparked a passionate controversy and debate about the way that arts organizations can transform urban neighborhoods, for better or for worse. This debate can be represented by two major figures, Robert Moses on the one hand, the famed city planner in New York during that era and, on the other hand, the activist, Jane Jacobs, who I have already mentioned. Two different views are represented here: The city plan is seen from the sky or looking at a map; and that's seen, if you will, from the stoop of an apartment building. Lincoln Center was conceived primarily from the former and certainly reflected that prevalent view of the time and one promoted by Robert Moses, which was a need for what he called "slum clearance". Lincoln Center, the cluster of arts organizations that he proposed, represented a huge effort by wealthy and powerful philanthropists and city officials to, in a way, install high culture in place of a distressed neighborhood and thereby transforming that place. The history of this development was that 14 square blocks on the West Side of Manhattan which had been primarily an African-American and Puerto Rican neighborhood of brownstone buildings and stores were planned as a cultural district and it was intended to include performing arts organizations of course but schools and thousands of middle- and upper-income apartments. university facilities and office towers also. Robert Moses coralled a great deal of support for this plan and eventually one of its champions was John D. Rockefeller, who supported it philanthropically and also provided a lot of leadership. The history around this is fascinating and definitely worth further reading. But for now the issues inherent in this epic kind of re-imagining of a city and the ramifications of it carry many interesting questions for our examination of the arts as a player in rethinking public space or public life, in fact. One contradiction here is the incredible displacement of residents of the neighborhood, many of whom, as low-income folks, would not be considered the typical consumer of the high art productions planned for Lincoln Center. Yet, on the other hand, there was what we might think of as a Dewian sentiment that drove Rockefeller to indicate, and there's this quote that sort of memorializes this perspective at Lincoln Center, where he says, "The arts are not for the privileged few, but for the many," so that kind of contradiction. Leonard Bernstein's famous musical, "West Side Story", the Romeo and Juliet story, played out in this case between the Puerto Rican and white gangs in that neighborhood, took place right here where what we think of as the Lincoln Center neighborhood. At that time this was known as San Juan Hill. And another contemporary example that sort of plays out the drama of that time is Matthew Lopez's play called "Somewhere," from 2008, and that deals with this very issue of how residents in this neighborhood viewed the coming demolition of it. Context of the kind of social and political moment in the United States might help us also understand the layers of motivation that went into conceiving this project. At the height of the Cold War in the late '50s and '60s the planners of the project, which included an august former army general, felt this imperative to exhibit America's cultural legitimacy, if not supremacy, at a time when when German and Russian performing arts traditions were so famous. And Lincoln Center itself was celebrated in a way as a national achievement as evidenced by President Eisenhower speaking at the groundbreaking in 1959 and first lady, Jackie Kennedy, attending the opening night performances there a few years later. Both of these issues raised in the story of Lincoln Center's creation, displacing poor populations so that the art will attract more wealth and putting the arts in service of this kind of nationalistic agenda, in both of these examples there's a burden on the Arts beyond its own intrinsic worth, or what Dewey might say is the human experience that can come from Arts. But even the strategy of clustering organizations together: the opera, the ballet, the theatre company: all surrounding one great Plaza, which itself was conceived in part to echo the Grand San Marco Square in Venice, versus a different strategy of spreading organizations throughout a city, this itself marked a notable disagreement in strategy. Jane Jacobs advocated for the vitality that arts organizations can bring to neighborhoods, enlivening the peoplescape of a block at different hours of a day with the stores, the offices, restaurants, the stoops, the sidewalks, all kind of remaining active throughout a day because of the various and diverse uses and the times of day that people might visit. And for this reason Jacobs famously argued cities were successful when they stimulate informal street-level interaction, creating what she called "a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust and a resource in times of great need and neighborhood need." She celebrated, as an example, Carnegie Hall in New York for the ways that it contributed to a vital neighborhood of diverse uses. I don't know what she'd say about that neighborhood today as larger and larger office and residential towers have gone up around it. But she was critical indeed of this notion of parking, all of this, you know, city enlivening energy that arts organizations can bring, all in one place at Lincoln Center, instead of dispersing them among many neighborhoods to activate that kind of energy. Today, after more than 50 years, the social and political context is certainly quite different as is the urban landscape of New York. But the questions about the role of this particular arts institution within the neighborhood and city remain. The visitor to Lincoln Center today might feel the grandeur or the awe-inspiring scale of the buildings and the open space between them, might get the feeling that this is a society that values the experiences that lie beyond the walls and feeling that there's some great significance there. But there's of course the question of, "Who doesn't feel invited to that experience? or For whom are these sort of imposing facades more of an intimidation than a welcoming gesture?" Thinking back to Dewey and his agenda to take art off its pedestals to restore continuity with daily life, as we keep talking about, Is there a contrast between the special field trip kind of ethic to a grand and special place like Lincoln Center, if you feel you belong, and the more neighborhood-scale experience, visiting a neighborhood Arts Center as we were thinking about with the WPA Community Arts Centers or for instance seeing one of the WPA Orchestras perform in a school gymnasium? What kind of arts experiences might we expect from these different environments or that the environments themselves might promote? What messages do they send about an arts place in our society? I'm not sure Dewey would necessarily legitimize one type and dismiss the other type of experience but the city building goals implied in each of these are definitely different. Jane Jacobs' view of the arts organization being a neighbor in a cluster of unlike urban features, even if it has the formality of a Carnegie Hall rather than a school gym, may more closely resemble Dewey's hopes for continuity. The rich tradition of neighborhood-based arts organizations picks up on this thread. And in the next section we'll visit with leaders from several of these organizations and think about their motivations for the impact of their work on their communities.

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